Morisseau, T, Davies, C and Matthews, D (2013) How do 3- and 5-year-olds respond to under- and over-informative utterances? Journal of Pragmatics, 59 (Part A). 26 - 39. ISSN 0378-2166
Abstract
As children learn their native languages, they come to have detailed expectations about how to refer to things. These expectations and the detection of their violations are key to inference-making processes. But what do children do when their expectations are not met? Using reaction-time measures and gaze-direction monitoring in a referential communication task, we investigated whether 3- and 5-year-olds notice the infelicity of under- and over-informative utterances and then seek out further information in order to recover the speaker's intended meaning. We tested how children resolve under-informative instructions such as "Find the orange" when there is more than one orange in view. We also tested whether instructions such as "Find the cat with a tail", in a context where there is only one, normal-looking cat, would lead them to question why the speaker was over-informative and to seek out further information. Both age groups were sensitive to the ambiguous instructions. Only 5-year-olds were significantly delayed and more likely to check their interlocutor's gaze when responding to over-informative expressions. We discuss how children's spontaneous motivation to resolve violations of expectation, coupled with increased speed of linguistic processing, drives language learning.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | (c) 2013, Elsevier. NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Pragmatics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Pragmatics, 59, Part A, (2013). 10.1016/j.pragma.2013.03.007 |
Keywords: | Informativity; Language acquisition; Referential communication; Referring expressions; Repair |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Languages Cultures & Societies (Leeds) > Linguistics & Phonetics (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 25 Apr 2014 11:30 |
Last Modified: | 12 Apr 2017 01:23 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.03.007 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.pragma.2013.03.007 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:78605 |